Dishonored 2

Before Dishonored, Arkane Studios had been quietly making solid immersive sims like Arx Fatalis, their very decent Ultima Underworld homage, for around ten years. If Dishonored 1 was their first game which felt fully featured and distinctive, then Dishonored 2 is their masterpiece, a culmination of a decade of experience toiling away at one of the most difficult genres for any developer to realize well. (Arkane Austin's Prey, hopefully soon also available on GOG, is their very good version of a modern day System Shock.) The average level in this game is intricate and layered, with many secrets and nooks waiting to be discovered by a patient and methodical player; the exceptional levels here - one involving a mansion with moving walls made of clockwork, another allowing the player to see and shift back and forth in time - are among the best I've played in any game. Dishonored is a series that prizes player choice, flexibility, and power above all else, playing a bit more like a superpowered Deus Ex than the challenging stealth of Thief to which it is often (misleadingly, I think) compared, but this time through there is an explicit option to reject powers which the game is balanced around just as much as a "normal" playthrough with Emily's or Corvo's powers. I've now run through it three times with each of those playstyles and there's still more to see and do I haven't done - odd as it seems for a title with a stealth focus, for example, the game has a very robust combat system for people who like to play a little louder. As for weaknesses, the narrative here is an oddly unengaging rehash of the DLC for the first game - playing them back to back makes that unfortunately apparent. And while Karnaca is beautifully designed with a rich Mediterranean feel to the art direction, it lacks the weird quasi-Victorian charm of the whale-based society of the first game. (In-game, whale power is being phased out.) But what it does well it does without parallel.

The gameplay is largely more of what Dishonored 1 had to offer. On my 6 year old mid-end desktop I’m having no issues whatsoever. This is one of those games that stands out among the *many* games I’ve played over ~25 years with its level design: two of them are nothing short of breathtaking in both concept and execution and you’ll never forget them. No spoilers, but you’ll know when you’re there – let’s call them the two »mansion levels«.

I have 22h played time in this game when I write this, 20 of the hours are me trying to get the game running. So I have basically not played it. I write this review now just in case someone else have problem with the performance. My Spec is: GTX 1080 Ryzen 5 2600X 3,6GHz 16GB Ram I had problemes with frame drops & stuttering, these problems where not that bad at the first mission. But at mission two everything went to hell. At the end I managed to get a stable 60FPS but the stuttering is not completley gone, it's playable for me though. I followed two youtube videos to get this to work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZrnfWpENTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsXFUVYPIx4 The first one help you set up Nvidia Control Panel in a more optical way, for me this helped. He have one for Nvidia & AMD GPUs. The second video will help you find a stable FPS. Make this game run well might required you to play around with the games settings a lot, it took me 20h to find fixes that worked for me. Hopefully the two links will help someone to make this game run. Good Luck

I noticed a bunch of reviews saying that the story isn't as good as the first game, and I disagree with this completely. However, while the game is offering two playable characters, the story feels way richer if you play as Emily. This is a story of coming of age through strife, and a story of trying to take your power back. This is a story of the empress getting to see just how much responsibility she has and what her personal negligence could actually do. All this is lost when you play as Corvo. And while I feel that the core message is better than that of the first game, D2 just shines in individual little stories and missions, most of which have some nice legitimately interesting twists in them now. Also, the fact that the protagonists have voices now goes a long way to build immersion. It felt weird to play as a mute guy in a personal story of revenge that was the first game. It's still great gameplay-wise, better graphically and stylistically, and is just way more fun than the relatively straightforward Dishonored 1. It's legitimately amazing, do play.